FASCISM

I have friends that know things, and that’s whythey’re my friends ― the types to twerk in church,street-smart clairvoyants who make fools awareof their foolishness ― and so I turn to them inthe darkest hours because they are dark and havesomehow survived long enough to tell me whereit hurts. And where isn’t as important a question to askas when, and when isn’t a question that needs askingbecause, with the eyes behind my eyes, I can tease outthe swell beneath any kind of bruise, can always find thecolor red running toward trauma. A long time ago,a willow of a woman told me why the caged bird sings,but nobody ever told me why people insist on puttingthemselves in cages, which is distinct from puttingother people in cages, which truly goes without sayingand has gone so for so long and hence here we are:body wine washing over the stones of our knuckles,sweeping the glass up off the floor. I, too, have a theoryabout broken windows I wish to submit to the Academy,but I heard it was burned to the ground last night; all thethings I don’t know could fill a book, but all the thingsI do know could get me killed, though I worry most aboutthe people who taught them to me, their pictures thumb-tacked to the wall of a smoke-filled room, faces freckled byholes made by dart after dart after dart after dart after dart.

Windowpane, 18th century, American. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. In 2017, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His work has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, River Styx, and elsewhere.